Kane's Joker

So ~kanefinger1939 just did an art dump and ~Neuroticfanboy said I absolutely HAD to add color to this Joker line art. [link] As you can see, I completely agreed. I liked the sketchy line art and feel a bit bad about completely abandoning oC lately so I decided to go back to my old coloring style as it would fit this image perfectly. Anyways, the line art is Kane's! Not mine! And I had a lot of fun with this because Joker is one of the awesomenest super villains ever. I mean, just look how insane he is!

I know Kane said he wasn't basing this Joker on Keith Ledger but... I went to him for color reference (hence the dark eye shadow). But since Kane went for a more traditional look I went to pictures of Jack Nickelson for further reference. Specifically the lovely orange vest and blue bow... tie... thing. I love the flower, it's sad that he doesn't have it anymore.

As for how I made this, the first thing to always do is move it into PS to mess with the line art's levels (nice and dark) and increase the size. Then move the edited line art to oC so use the lovely watercolor tool to color and shade this lovely piece, then move it all back into PS one layer at a time to trim all the excess color I have to use to properly shade in oC. As a final touch I added some shine to his hair and smeared it around plus dodged his lip shine a little to make it stand out more. I think I really like how this came out and like I said: it was a lot of fun to work on!

Character is copyright DC Comics
Line art copyright to ~kanefinger1939
Coloring copyright to Me.